By Leora Yedida Bilsky

Can Israel be both Jewish and democratic? Transformative Justice, Leora Bilsky's landmark study of Israeli political trials, poses this deceptively simple question. The four trials that she analyzes focus on identity, the nature of pluralism, human rights, and the rule of law-issues whose importance extends far beyond Israel's borders. Drawing on the latest work in philosophy, law, history, and rhetoric, Bilsky exposes the many narratives that compete in a political trial and demonstrates how Israel's history of social and ideological conflicts in the courtroom offers us a rare opportunity to understand the meaning of political trials. The result is a bold new perspective on the politics of justice and its complex relationship to the values of liberalism. Leora Bilsky is Professor of Law, Tel Aviv University.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 393p

By Meredith Rossner and Helen Taylor

Restorative justice is an idea and a practice that has had a significant impact on criminology over the past four decades and has proliferated throughout the criminal justice system. Yet from the beginning of this movement, there have been worries that the mainstreaming of restorative justice will lead to its dilution, or even corruption, and undermine its transformative potential. Developing alongside the growing institutionalization of restorative justice has been a transformative justice movement that has arisen from larger movements for racial and gender justice, drawing on similar foundational values to restorative justice. This review interrogates the relationship between restorative and transformative justice by examining a flourishing of ideas and experiments at the margins of the restorative justice movement in three key areas—responses to racial injustice, sexual violence, and environmental harm—and finds that restorative justice has the capacity to work at multiple levels to respond to harm, transform relationships, and prevent future injustices.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 357 - 381